


Lost Boy

by Manya_Kami



Category: Subarashiki Kono Sekai | The World Ends With You
Genre: Angst, Drabble, Gen, If you read this fic with a blacklight then you’ll find the big fat Neku/Josh pisstain, Joshua-centric, Metaphors, introspective, light sex mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-24
Updated: 2019-01-24
Packaged: 2019-10-15 08:22:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17525201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Manya_Kami/pseuds/Manya_Kami
Summary: All children, except one, grow up.





	Lost Boy

**Author's Note:**

> Summary and title are allusions to J. M. Barrie’s ‘Peter and Wendy.’ Two lines toward the end nod to that theme as well. 
> 
> There’s also the reoccurring “half-remembered dream” line which, aside from dreams being my go-to motif, is from Christopher Nolan’s Inception.

Neku is only fifteen years old.

 

He’s young, he’s _so_ young and Joshua thinks that perhaps that’s the reason he let him go, let all his friends go, that perhaps there’s something that Joshua wants to see in Neku as that youth wears away.

 

He’s only a child.

 

He is a _child_ entering his first year of secondary schooling, dominated by the bold and sharp blackness of his gakuran and distracted by a hazy reminiscence of a half-remembered dream.

 

They are all _children_ , that lot, with dreams and aspirations that have no place in the UG. They’re damn _children_ , children that part ways at the scramble crossing so that they can make it home in time for curfew or run errands for their parents or get enough shut-eye before the next early morning, because Rhyme is still in _primary_ _school_ and her bell rings an hour before Beat’s at the ass-crack of dawn.

 

They’re children then, but Joshua watches them grow up from the UG because he wants to know what that could look like.

 

He watches them — the drawling years, that is — when they pass by like pages in a book.

 

He watches Beat take on a host of disjointed odd-jobs after graduating and the performance is like a juggling act; trying to slot in all the hours and still have enough money to pay for food and an apartment. Still saving away time and spirit to visit Rhyme, who’s in fucking high school now.

 

He watches Neku and Shiki become an item, and of course they would when they were partners _first_. He watches them fuck for the first time, all misshapen and awkward because they're still nearly damn _kids_. He watches their relationship collapse after a point, when they both realize the only thing keeping them together is a half-remembered dream.

 

He watches Neku cut his hair and become a salaryman, of all things. Watches him when he finds a new woman and settles down.

 

He watches Neku as he dreams and dreams, and forgets one of long ago.

 

He’s still watching when Neku and his wife sit down one night at dinner.

 

“ _I’ve_   _got_ _a_ _surprise_ _for_ _you_.” Is the theme of tonight’s episode.

 

That woman tells Neku she’s pregnant. This isn’t a surprise to Joshua. He was watching when the damn thing was _conceived_ , after all.

 

It’s what Neku says that catches him off guard.

 

“I’ve been promoted,” He begins, with an articulate crispness that had seemed to developed during his early twenties. “They’re moving me. To a building in Higashimurayama.”

 

From his seat in the audience, Joshua stills.

 

Higashimurayama. That’s still Tokyo, and only about a hour’s drive — but that doesn’t matter.

 

Joshua can’t leave Shibuya.

 

Something becomes clear, in that moment. Quite suddenly Joshua can’t remember clearly what he’s doing here, what he’s _been_ doing here, why it even matters, why any damn _thing_ mattered in the first place—

 

He’s wasted away seventeen years now, and to what end? He knows, deep down he knows, that in some way he’d been living through Neku, through Shiki and Rhyme and Beat and messily inserting himself into the equation wondering “I wonder what _I’d_ be like if—”

 

But so what? Neku is thirty-two now. Neku is thirty-two and Joshua is so _so_ much older than that, but how much does that even fucking matter when all those years don’t have any kind of effect?!

 

Neku is thirty-two. And Joshua? Joshua is _done_.

 

* * *

  


He slips into the RG.

 

He’s like a ghost, a lost boy playing games on Neverland forever because he’s forgotten who he was.

 

Or maybe he was Peter then, so disenchanted with who he could have been that something like that didn’t seem to matter.

 

“Welcome back, J,” Says Hanekoma when he strolls into WildKat later that night. “It’s been a while.”

 

“Mhmm.” He drawls. “Seventeen years, in fact.”

 

“Good show?”

 

“Good enough. I’m bored now, Sanae. Let’s say we make a new game?”

  
  
  
  



End file.
